ALR survey and Pimm

I’ve received messages from all sorts of sources, including all political stripes and a range of groups, and they have all just encouraged people to do the survey without telling them what to say. In itself, directing supporters about how to approach a survey is not improper, and sometimes it’s essential. However, in this case there was obviously a broad sense that directing supporters like that was unnecessary (since the questions are clearly and fairly explained) and undesirable.

That has changed with an email message from former agriculture minister Pat Pimm to a buddy of Bill Bennett, the mines minister behind Bill 24. I imagine the message may prompt others to start informing their circles about ways to counteract it. At this stage, I’m not sure whether I’ll bother.

What I will do here is provide the Pimm message, exactly as received except that I deleted the email addresses from the To/Cc fields to protect privacy. (I did leave in the name “Faye,” and that’s not a problem because that person chose several months ago to be high-profile in collaborating with Bennett and Pimm.)

There are several articles on the ALR Regulation consultation on this blog. See especially “Examples of ALR Regulation survey,” which goes into great depth but also provides some conclusions at the end for those who can’t spare more time.

kewljim posted: “The B.C. Ministry of Agriculture is conducting a survey related to refining the ALR Regulation. One can go straight to the online survey or read a consultation paper first. I’ve received messages from all sorts of sources, including all political strip”

Hi Jim,

Forgive me for naivete, and I need to look into this more, but on the face of it, I find it a bit confusing what is going on. Pimm is afraid of a “complete railroad job” and wants to get the response “we want” – but it’s his government that is in control of this survey, is it not? We have, he says, just gone through a “so-called consultation” – but surely it is his government’s consultation???? I think your posting does call as many as possible to respond to the survey, but can you explain the ins and outs of this email to someone like me who doesn’t get it? Steve

Steve, if you click on the “Bill 24” in the “Categories” drop-down menu in the main menu at left and go to the early articles in the previous 18 articles related to Bill 24, you’ll get some sense of the background. In my view, the whims of Bill Bennett and Pat Pimm got pushed into law to the detriment of the future of British Columbia. When Norm Letnick became minister (for the second time) in April 2014, he wanted to do consultation, but Bennett managed to snuff his efforts. Now Letnick is finally getting to do some consultation, and he is making sure it gets done well. (Realize that Letnick was agriculture minister for a while before the 2013 election, seemingly doing a good job, but inexplicably got replaced by Pimm after the election.) The Bennett-Pimm camp is not happy that Letnick is doing thorough consultation after they managed to avoid consultation. The “we” in the Pimm message is the Bennett-Pimm camp, not the Liberal government of BC. Later today I could add a post above this one that gives a bigger current picture, and I could possibly add something more (above that) about the survey tomorrow.